'Threads of Life' tell immigrants' stories one quilt at a time

JOSHUA POLSON/jpolson@greeleytribune.com
Molly Johnson Martinez talks briefly about a quilt while on a tour through the Mariani and Oak Room Galleries on Wednesday afternoon in Guggenheim Hall on the University of Northern Colorado campus. The quilts were part of the "Los Hilos de la Vida," or the threads of life, collection.

JOSHUA POLSON/jpolson@greeleytribune.com
Dayna Bedingfield, left, and Shelley Peetz examine several of the quilts on display in Guggenheim Hall on Wednesday afternoon on the University of Northern Colorado campus.

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When Molly Johnson Martinez left the University of Northern Colorado, she was going to be an artist. Actually, more like an Artiste.

“It was all about me,” Martinez said.

That changed. Sometimes age or children will offer the perspective needed to look beyond your navel, but in Martinez’s case, it was the quilts currently hanging in the UNC galleries. She was in town last week to show them off.

She still paints mixed-media, and it still sells, but she wasn’t there to show her own work. In fact, she never mentioned it to a small crowd who came to listen to her talk. She was there to brag on her students.

She attended UNC to study and play trombone after growing up in Fort Bragg, Calif., and seeing a brochure with beautiful mountains in the background. After she saw a famous jazz trombonist selling pot, she decided the life of a musician wasn’t for her. So she walked over to the art school. When she left the school in the late 1990s, a credit or two from graduating — she would finish it later — she was ready to become famous.

Then she had to make money. Well, reality can be a bummer. She worked as an artist, but she also worked in convalescence homes for a few years, and then, after a successful art show, had enough money to visit Mexico with some friends. She was the only one who could speak a little Spanish. She enjoyed it and studied the language hard, then got her teaching credentials and wound up in charge of a parenting class in 2005 full of immigrant women in Boonville, Calif.

She laughed to herself after taking the job. She and her brother used to drive through Boonville and wonder who the heck would ever live there. It makes Greeley look like New York, she said.

She struggled with the class, which was part of a program to help the women become more comfortable with sending their own kids to school and maybe even get their GEDs. Martinez wondered what she could teach them about parenting when they already seemed like great mothers, and so she worked on some English. She had trouble keeping them in the class, as their husbands thought it was a waste of time. And the women were supposed to journal to fulfill the grant paying for the class, and the women thought THAT was a waste of time. They had a busy family life that didn’t leave them a spare moment for a diary.

She was an artist, however, so she brought some quilting materials. She had them make piñatas once, and the husbands were more supportive when they could see a product, something tangible, from the class. The women peered over the quilts, working like soldiers trying to decipher an enemy code.

“This was the first time in their lives they had gotten to do anything for themselves,” Martinez said.

Martinez saw the value in it when the women brought their finished quilts back to class, now called Threads of Life. Many of them told amazing stories she initially couldn’t pull out of them. Some showed scenes from crossing the border, with death’s black robe waiting in a deep river or hovering over a trailer where a dozen suffocated to death. Other quilts showed their culture, something as simple as a woman carrying a fruit basket to a market. Even others portrayed the loneliness they felt from their husbands spending years in the United States working to send them money. There were also quilts that offered slices of life anyone could experience; one displayed in the UNC galleries portrays a battle with endometriosis and pictures of babies who represent the children the disease kept the quilter from having.

Now there isn’t a time when Martinez doesn’t have some of the quilts hanging somewhere in the country. Some are for sale (90 percent of the proceeds go to the women who make them) and some aren’t. After one woman sold a quilt, she was excited about the money, but she was thrilled to know that her idea — her life, really — connected with someone else, Martinez said.

Martinez calls many of her students friends (more than 100 have gone through her class) and will even represent them in immigration service hearings to help bridge the language barrier. It’s a hard life they live, and while some of their husbands find work in grape fields, others can’t find work at all or even have to turn to the pot trade.

“I think it’s a waste what we’ve done with our immigrants,” Martinez said. “I know one who is a wonderful teacher, and she has to babysit at her house. I don’t know what the answer is, but there are all sorts of amazing people.”

As for Martinez, she gets more joy from helping the women express themselves and make quilts than anything she’s done as an artist. It’s no longer about her.

No, it’s now about her students, such as one woman who received her GED. Her quilt pictured her asleep at her desk, piles of books at her side, while the moon shone through the window of her home.

— Staff writer Dan England covers the outdoors, entertainment and general assignment stories. His column runs on Tuesday. If you have an idea for a column, call (970) 392-4418 or email dengland@greeleytribune.com. Follow him on Twitter @ DanEngland.